History of Muskingum County, Ohio ; with illustrations and biographical sketches of prominent men and pioneers, 1794, Part 2

Author: Everhart, J. F; Graham, A. A., Columbus, Ohio, pub
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: [Columbus, O.] : F.J. Everhart & Co.
Number of Pages: 600

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pose. * * * Many able writers upon Ameri- can Antiquities have given much attention to the numerous class of works which have usually been denominated sacrificial mounds. * *

* To my own mind, the evidences are almost conchi- sive that these should be denominated Cremation Mounds ; and that up to a certain period this was the usual. perhaps universal, method of dispos- ing of the remains of departed friends. The size of the mound would then indicate the rank of him whose body was thus consumed therein. Upon no other hypothesis can we account for the earth being heaped upon the so-called altars while the fires were yet burning, leaving some

portions of wood yet unconsumed. The latter custom seems to have been the one universally practiced by the mound builders of Missouri."

Should the idea here advanced be substantiated by future investigation that cremation was once the prevailing custom, and that at some period it was discontinued and mound burial adopted in its place, then it would seem altogether probable that Southeastern Missouri was peopled at some time subsequent to that event, and therefore the works so abundant there are more recent than those of the Ohio Valley.

John T. Short, in the North Americans of An- tiquity, page 130 : " It is quite certain that cranies of the Northwest Mounds, as compared with those of the Mississippi region, clearly point to the fact of relationship with Asia. Strong reas- ons for supposing a remote intercourse between Asia and the Pacific Coast." Idem, page 147 : " No claim has been advanced, we believe, which advocates an actual Egyptian colonization of the New World, but strong arguments have been used to show that the architecture and sculpture of Central America and Mexico have been influ- enced from Egypt, if not directly attributable to Egyptian artisans."

Mr. Bancroft remarks : " The customs, manner of life. and physical ap- pearance of the natives on both sides of the Straits are identical, as a multitude of witnesses testify." Again : "If the original population of this continent were not Japanese, at least a con- siderable infusion of Japanese blood into the orig- inal stock has taken place." Idem, page 154: "The only remaining theory, and probably the most important of all, because of its purely scien- tific character, which presents itself for our con- sideration is that which not only considers the civilization of Ancient America to have been in- digenous, but also claims the inhabitants them- selves to have been autoch-thonic ; in a word, the process of evolution, or in some other way, the first Americans were either developed from a lower order of the animal kingdom, or were created on the soil of this continent. As the lat- ter involves the denial of the unity of the race, it requires proof before we can consider it." Page 187 : " We have every reason to believe that the men of the mounds were capable of executing in sculptures reliable representations of animate ob- jects. The perfection of the stone carvings, as well as the terra cotta moulded figures of animals and birds obtained from the mounds, have ex- cited the wonder and admiration of their discov- erers. Against the Ethnic Unity : Indians there- fore not Mound-Builders." Page 190: "Proba- bly one of the most incontrovertible arguments against American Ethnic Unity is that which rests upon the imparalleled diversity of language which meets the philologist everywhere. The actual number of American languages and dia- lects is as vet unascercained. but is estimated at thirteen hundred, six hundred of which Mr. Ban- croft has classified in his third volume of The Na- tive Races of the Pacific States.

Idem, page 195 : " We call attention to the words of the distinguished Prof. Haeckel, in his " His-

HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.

tory of Creation," which are as follows : . Prob- ably America was first peopled from Northeast- ern Asia by the same tribe of Mongols from whom the Polar men ( Hyperboreans and Esqui- maux ) have also branched. This tribe spread first in North America, and from thence migrated over the isthmus of Central America down to South America, at the extreme south of which the species degenerated very much, by adaption to the unfavorable conditions of existence. But it is also possible that Mongols and Polynesians emigrated from the west and mixed with the former tribe. In any case, the aborigines of America came over from the old world, and did not, as some suppose, in any way originate out of American apes. Catarhine, or narrow-nosed apes, never at any period existed in America.' The same argument holds good if it be ascer- tained that both man and apes developed from a common ancestor. With these authoritative ut- terances from the most celebrated representatives of the development school, we shall rest the fan- ciful hypothesis of the autoch-thonic origin of the ancient American population."

P. 232 : " It is common to look upon the Tol- tecs and Aztecs as the first inhabitants of Mex- ico. Such a conclusion is erroneous, since they were preceded in Central Southern America and even in Anahuac by people of different extrac- tion from themselves, and by scattering tribes of their own linguistic family-the Nahua. And all the carly writers refer to them in terms which indicate that they were disposed to accept the existence of a race of giants as a fact ! "

P. 234: "The tribes which figured conspicu- ously in Mexico prior to the Toltecs, and not re- lated to the Nahuas, were the Miztecs and Zapo- tecs, whose language was not Mava, as some have supposed." P. 234 : "Their civilization,' says Bancroft, "in Oajaca, rivaled that of the Aztecs."

J. P. Maclean, p. 131 : "Indians have no tra- ditions concerning them, and know nothing about this people." P. 135: "The decayed Condition of the Skeleton .- In nearly every case the skel- eton has been found in such a state of decay as to forbid an intelligent examination. Probably not over half a dozen have been recovered in a condition suitable for restoration. This is all the more remarkable from the fact that the earth around them has invariably been found wonder- fully compact and dry. The locality, the method of burial, the earth impervious to water, all tend to the preservation of the body. Well preserved skeletons have been taken from the tumuli of Europe, known to have been deposited there not less than 2,000 years ago. The mode of burial was not better adapted for the preservation of the body than that of the mound-builders. Yet the latter were exhumed in a decomposed and crumbling condition. From this consideration alone, a greater antiquity must be assigned to them than to the burrows of Europe. This point has been lost sight of by some modern stu- dents."

From the Chautauqua Library of English His-

tory and Literature, chapter 1. Britons and Ro- mans. 1. British Period : from date unknown to 55 B. C. ; "The earliest inhabitants of Britain. In days long past, while the children of Israel, perhaps, were groaning in bondage and Moses was yet unknown, a non-Arvan people, pursued by want or driven by war, settled in England. The island was then a desolate waste of marsh land and forest. The bear and the wolf roamed through the thick woods, and the beaver built in he reeky fens, a wild and worthless land an d a wretched race : for they passed away, leaving little more mark of their presence than did the herds that pastured near their low huts."

History has preserved no record of these ear- liest inhabitants of England. Only some rude burial mounds, in which are instruments of flint and bone, which are now and then turned up by the spade, are left to tell us about them. But, from the evidence gleaned from these remains, it seems cer- tain that generation after generation came and went before they were dispossessed by men of another race. Some knowledge they acquired during these long years : for, "beginning with heavy bones for hammers and sharp bones for knives, they gradually came to manufacture stone instruments and work in horn ; they har- pooned the whale, and fought on more than equal terms with the wild beasts of the forest. But before they had attained higher progress they were surprised by invaders, strangers, men with better arms, who slew them or drove them into the hills." [See Pearson's History of Eng- land. chap. 1.]

In Freeman's History of England we read : "The Celtic occupation of Britain. The people who succeeded these rude tribes were members of the Aryan race, which has given to the world its best civilization. They were called Celts, and were divided into two classes : the Gaelic, still represented by the Celts of Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands, and the Cymric, represented by the Celts of Wales and Cornwall. We do not know when the Celtic people came to England, which they called Britain, but there is scarcely an English village that has not some mark of their presence which carries us back an almost indefinite time in the history of the world."

According to Dr. Everett W. Fish, in the Egyptian Pyramids." "The stone inscriptions were the earliest types of written language. In word presentation, though not in morphology, they resemble the Chinese syllabicism ; certain forms became associated with certain ideas. sometimes relative, sometimes cognate, and henceforth were used to represent them. In the course of years the idea-character became con- tracted to a word or syllable. The early Aryan or Semitic types of picture writing were distin- guished by a predominence of vowel elements ; the Coptic by nearly an absence of vowels and preponderance of consonants. But some time during this thousand years vowels appear in such quantity as to indicate a new element in stone literature. Also the co-relation between the age, characters and personal attributes of the Cheops

CHISELS, GOUGES AND ADZES.

STONE AND CLAY FIPES.

HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY.

of Herodotus in the Suphis of Manettro-the fourth Memphian and the sixth Egyptian dynas- ties-points unmistakably in the direction that all these finger marks of the period do, viz : that at or just before the Memphian conquest of Thebes, all Egypt was invaded by a more intel- lectual people ; that they left their marks on the monumental history and the facial and cranical angles, and on the national character of the hith- erto Hindoo, and Hamitic, occupants of the val- ley. Their life channel may be traced in its one grand tradition-its origin from Menes. Its Mones came from Menu of India, and it went, 1,000 years later, into Attic Theotechony as Minos. There is also one channel in which a search among traditions of the invading race is confined : that is, the stream of Theosophy older than Menu, Sabeism or the perpetual fires of Iran : the monotheism of the race kindred to the Abrahamic, of whom Melchi-Zedek is the earliest Pontiff King ! If the philosophy of this singular history teaches us of the invasion of the Shepherd Kings at this time, it also teaches that they were subsequently repelled, though not conquered."

"There is a widespread belief that the ancient Egyptians were a highly developed race intel- lectually, yet it is an error as far as it refers to the pre-Ptolemaic period. In astronomy, math- ematics, chemistry, art, economics, literature, painting, sculpture, perspective, etc., they were singularly and persistently backward ; no arch relieves the severe angular structures. The sun moved around from east to west in its risings. Its figures came from Arabia. Its letters changed not from sound-pictures. Its tomb paintings were daubs."

Mrs. Dr. Fish argues the improbability of the Egyptians designing the Great Pyramid : "The Stone Logos .- The most remarkable develop- ment of the Great Pyramid in its relation to that religion which has descended to us through the Abrahamic race. It must give not a little weight to the history of those races de- scended from Shem, but out of the Abrahamic succession ; for, no doubt, the Captitorim, the Canaanites in general, and the races under Mel- chizedek, were part of the original monotheists. The peculiar history of the Pyramid's erection ; its freedom from idolatrous hieroglyphs, present in every other tomb and temple in Egypt, and its marvelous problems-almost if not quite prophetic -also should be taken into account.

The prophetic nature of the chronology, con- tained in the passages, representing events in the history of the Hebrew race, is strong indica- tion of a theistic design on the part of the builder. The peculiar prominence of the 'Sacred Cubit' is also worthy of notice, especially as this cubit (25 Pyramid inches ) was not in use either by the Egyptians or Hebrews as a people. It was given of God, as witnessed by Ezekiel, chap. XL, V. 5, and consisted of a 'cubit and a hand breadth.' Again, Isaiah, chap. 19, verses 19-20: 'In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar in the border thereof to the Lord.

· And it shall be for a sign and a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt ; for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a Savior, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.'"

. Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid," by Piazzi Smyth, F.R. S.E., F.R. A.S., Astrono- mer Royal for Scotland .- Inasmuch as one of the symbols in the inscription is found over the one and sole original entrance passage into the great pyramid, the compiler feels not only aston- ished that that symbol is only found on the pyr- amids, but constrained to cite the learned author concerning the Great Pyramid in several par- ticulars :

" The ancient pyramids of Egypt form some- what of a long, clustering group of gigantic monuments, extending chiefly over about a de- gree of latitude ; beginning in the north, at the head of the triangular-shaped land of Lower Egypt, and stretching thence southward along the western side of the Nile.

Within that nearly meridian distance one trav- eler claims to have noted forty-five ; another says sixty-seven ; and another still, leaving Egypt altogether, and ascending the river as far as Merve Noori, and Barkal, in Ethiopia, men- tions one hundred and thirty as existing there. But they are mediaeval, rather than ancient. small instead of large, and with very little about them, either in form or material, to remind of the more typical early examples entirely in stone, or those really mathematically shaped old pyra- mids, which, though few in number, are what have made the world-wide fame of their land's architecture from before the beginning of his- tory."

" With many of the smaller and later pyramids there is little doubt about their objects ; for, built by the Egyptians as sepulchres for the great Egyptian dead, such dead-both Pharaohs and their relatives-were buried in them, and with all the written particulars, pictorial accompani- ments, and idolatrous adornments of that too graphic religion, which the fictile nation on the Nile ever delighted in. But as we approach, ascending the stream of ancient time, in any careful chronological survey of pyramidal struc- tures, to the Great Pyramid, Egyptian emblems are gradually left behind : and in and throughout that mighty builded mass, which all history and all tradition, both ancient and modern, agree in representing as the first in point of date of the whole Jeezeh, and even the whole Egyptian group, the earliest stone building also positively known to have been erected in any country, we find in all its finished parts not a vestige of heathenism, nor the smallest indulgence in any- thing approaching to idolatry : no Egyptology of any kind, properly so called, and not even the most distant allusion to Sabaism and its worship of sun, or moon, or any of the starry host of heaven.

"I have specified finished parts, because in certain unfinished, interminal portions of the con- structive masonry of the Great Pyramid discoy-

HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.

ered by Colonel Howard Vyse in 1837, there are some rude Egyptian markings for a temporary mechanical purpose ; and I also except, as a matter of course, any inscriptions inflicted on the same pyramid by modern travelers, even though they have attempted, like the Prussian savants of 1848, A. D., to cut their names in their own slight ideas of the ancient hieroglyphics of the old Egyptian idolators. But with these simple exceptions, we can most positively say that both exterior and interior are absolutely free from all engraved or sculptured work, as well as from everything relating to idolatry or erring man's theotechnic devices. From all these hieratic emblems, therefore, which from first to last have utterly overlaid every Egyptian temple proper, as well as all Egypt's obelisks, sphinxes, statues, tombs, and whatever other monuments they (the Egyptians) did build up at any known historical and Pharaonic epoch in connection with their peculiar, and, alas ! degrading religion.

" Was the Great Pyramid, then, erected be- fore the invention of hieroglyphics, and previous to the birth of the false Egyptian religion? No ! for these, both history, tradition, and recent ex- ploratory discoveries, testified to by many trav- elers and antiquaries, are perfectly in accord, and assure us that the Egyptian nation was established, was powerful, and its spiritually vile hieratic system largely developed, though not arrived at its full proportions at the time of the erection of the Great Pyramid ; that that struc- ture was even raised by the labor of the Egyptian population ; but under some remarkable com- pulsion and constraint, which prevented them from putting their unmistakable and accustomed decorations on the finished building ; and espec- ially from identifying it in any manner, direct or indirect, with their impure and even bestial form of worship.

"According to Manetho, Herodotus, and other ancient authorities, the Egyptians hated, and yet implicitly obeyed, the power that made them work on the Great Pyramid ; and when that power was again relaxed or removed, though they still hated its name to such a degree as to forbear from even mentioning it, except by a peculiar circumlocution, yet, with involuntary bending to the sway of a really superior intelli- gence once amongst them, they took to imitating, as well as they could, though without any under- standing, for a few of the more ordinary mechan- ical features of that great work on which they had been so long employed ; and they even re- joiced for a time to adapt them, so far as they could be adapted, to their own favorite ends and congenial occupations.

" Hence the numerous ' quasi,' copies for sep- ulchral purposes, of the Great Pyramid, which are now to be observed, further south along that western bank of the Nile; always betraying, though, on close examination, the most profound ignorance of their noble model's chiefest internal features, as well as of all its niceties of propor- tion and exactness of measurement ; and such mere failures are never found, even then, at any

very great number of miles away from the site ; nor any great number of years behind the date of the colossal parent work.

The full architectural idea, indeed, of the one grand primeval monument, though expen- sively copied during a few centuries, yet never wholly or permanently took the fancy of the Egyptians. It had some suitabilities to their favorite employment of lasting sepulture, and its accompanying rites ; so they tried what they knew of it for that purpose. But it did not ad- duction of their unwieldy 'sacred' animals, nor bulls, nor crocodiles, nor the multitudes of abject mit of their troops of priests nor the easy intro- worshippers, with the facility of their own tem- ples ; and so, on the whole, they preferred them. Those more opened and columned, as well as sculptured and inscribed structures, ac- cordingly, of their own entire elaboration, are the only ones which we now find to have held, from their first invention, and uninterrupted reign through all the course of ancient and mediaeval Egyptian history ; and to reflect themselves con- tinuously in the placid Nile, from one end of the long drawn Hamitic land to the other. They therefore are, architecturally, Egypt. Thebes, too, with its hundred adorned Pylon temple- gates, and statues of false gods, is intensely Egypt. But the Great Pyramid is, in its origin and nature, something perfectly different.

Under whose direction, then, and for what purpose, was the Great Pyramid built? Whence did so foreign an idea to Egypt come? Who was the mysterious carrier of it to that land, and under what sort of special compunction was it that, in his day, the Egyptians labored in a cause which they appreciated not, and gave their un- rivaled mechanical skill for an end which they did not at the time understand, and which they never even came to understand, much less to like, in all their subsequent national ages? [Win- chell tells us it was Cheops, 3400 years B. (.]

This has been, indeed, a mystery of myster- ies, but may yet prove fruitful, in the present advancing stage of knowledge; to inquire into further ; for though theories without number have been tried and failed in, by ancient Greeks and mediaeval Arabians, by French, English, Germans, and Americans, their failures partly pave for us the road by which we must set out. Pave it poorly, perhaps, for their whole result has, up to the present time, been little more than this : that the authors of those attempts are either found to be repeating idle tales, told them by those who knew no more about the subject than themselves ; or skipping all the really crucial points of application for their theories which they should have attended to; or, finally, like some of the best and ablest men who have given themselves to the question, fairly admitting that they were entirely beaten.

Hence the exclusive notion of temples to the sun and moon, or for sacred fire, or holy water, or burial places, and nothing but burial places, of kings, or granaries for Joseph, or astronom- ical observatories, or defenses to Egypt against

HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.

being invaded by the sands of the African desert, or places of resort for mankind in a second del- uge, or of safety when the heavens should fall, have been for a long time past proved untenable ; and the Great Pyramid stands out now far more clearly than it did in the time of Herodotus (no less than 2400 years ago), as both a prehistoric monument, and yet rivaling the best things of modern times in its eminently grand and pure conception ; and which, though in Egypt, is yet not of Egypt, and whose true and full explana- tion is still to come.

Under these circumstances it is that a new idea, based not on ancient hieroglyphics, pro- fane learning, Egyptian literature, or modern Egyptology springing therefrom, but on new scientific measures of the actual facts of ancient masonic construction in number, weight and measure, was recently given to the world by the late Mr. John Taylor, of London, in a book pub- lished in 1859. He had not visited the Pyramid himself, but had been, for thirty years previously, collecting and comparing all the published accounts, and especially all the better certified mensurations (for some were certainly poor, indeed), of those who had been there ; and while so engaged, gradually and quite spontaneously, (as he described to me by letter), the new theory opened out before him. Though mainly a rigid induction from tangible facts of scientific bearing and character, Mr. Taylor's result was undoubt- edly assisted by means of the mental and spirit- ual point of view from whence he commenced his researches, and which is, in the main, sim- ply this :

That, whereas, other writers have generally esteemed that the unknown existency who di- rected the building of the Great Pyramid (and to whom the Egyptians, in their traditions and for ages afterwards, gave an immoral and even abominable character), must, therefore, have been very bad, indeed, so that the world at large, from that time to this, has ever been fond of standing on, kicking and insulting that dead lion whom they really knew nothing of-he (Mr. John Taylor), seeing how religiously bad the idol-serving Egyptians themselves were, was led to conclude that those they hated (and could never sufficiently abuse) might perhaps have been pre-eminently good, or were, at all events, of a different religious faith from the land of Ham. Then remembering, with mulatis mutan- dis, what Christ himself says respecting the sus- picion to be attached, when all the world speaks well of any one, Mr. Taylor followed up this idea by what the Old Testament does record touching the most vital and distinguishing part of the Israelitish religion, and which is therein described, some centuries after the building of the Great Pyramid, as notoriously an . abomina- tion to the Egyptians ;' and combining with this certain unmistakable historical facts, he success- fully deduced sound Christian reasons for believ- ing that the directors of the building-or rather the authors of its design-and those who con- trolled the actual builders of the Great Pyramid,

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History of Muskingum County, Ohio ; with illustrations and biographical sketches of prominent men and pioneers, 1794, Part 2

Author: Everhart, J. F; Graham, A. A., Columbus, Ohio, pub Publication date: 1882 Publisher: [Columbus, O.] : F.J. Everhart & Co. Number of Pages: 600

Author: Everhart, J. F; Graham, A. A., Columbus, Ohio, pub
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: [Columbus, O.] : F.J. Everhart & Co.
Number of Pages: 600